As promised in the last Writer’s Notebook entry, I wrote a story for Ryan Werner’s Our Band Could Be Your Lit blog. I’ve been a fan of this project since before it began, back when it was still an exercise on my blog, but I’m awfully damn impressed with where Ryan is taking it. AndContinue reading “A new story”
Tag Archives: fiction
A Writer’s Notebook: Our Band Could Be Your Lit
This week the writer’s notebook will get delayed. That’s not because I’m not working, but because I’m working toward something. I’ve agreed to write a guest-blog story for Our Band Could Be Your Lit, so I’m using this week’s Notebook to work on that. But the story won’t get posted until Sunday (and probably won’tContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Our Band Could Be Your Lit”
Last lines
We writers pay a lot of attention to first lines. They’re supremely important — for the reader, they are the opening impression, the first glimpse not only at the story but also at the style of the story and even (dare I say it in this age of modern criticism) at the author. For theContinue reading “Last lines”
10 tips on writing from the Chronicle of Higher Ed
One of my professors from graduate school posted on her Facebook a link to an article, “10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a strange title, partly because the URL truncates the title to read “10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less,” which is precisely the opposite of this article’s purpose: The tipsContinue reading “10 tips on writing from the Chronicle of Higher Ed”
New fiction by David Maizenberg
A long time ago, I accidentally found an amazing little collection of short stories that felt unlike anything I’d read before–and in the best possible way. The book was Invitations to a Bridge Burning, by David Maizenberg, and they profoundly changed the way I think about fiction. I had by that time been through enoughContinue reading “New fiction by David Maizenberg”
A Writer’s Notebook: Prose haiku
Technically, this is just a very short short-short, the flashiest of flashes (to borrow a phrase from Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually), but I’ll explain below why I call it a “prose haiku.” She sat on a thick window sill outside the store and tucked into tiny chicken wings, so small they looked like friedContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Prose haiku”
New publication
A bit of news: A short while ago–the day before my birthday, in fact–I got word from Red Fez that they wanted to publish my story “Kamikaze.” Today, the issue went online. It’s also chock full of other great stories and poems, so make sure to check out the whole issue. For links to someContinue reading “New publication”
Interview with Darin Bradley, author of Noise
Darin Bradley‘s apocalyptic novel Noise hit bookshelves, both physical and virtual, today. So I thought I’d ask Darin a few questions about his novel, the apocalypse, and writing in general. The resulting e-mail conversation, which has spanned the past few weeks, has turned out to be very long, which is a good thing, because DarinContinue reading “Interview with Darin Bradley, author of Noise”
A Writer’s Notebook: “Casting a Wide Net”
This week, another exercise from Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. In this exercise, McCloud asks us to create a cast of characters that share one trait (from a list of traits–see below) but are different in at least four other ways. These academics are my four characters (in the order I wrote them). Sandra: 45, aContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: “Casting a Wide Net””
Noise, by Darin Bradley
A friend of mine is releasing his first novel in a couple of weeks, an apocalyptic novel called Noise. I haven’t read it yet, but by all accounts, it’s awesome. (I have read the teaser text on the publisher’s website–it certainly looks awesome!) Darin and I are bouncing back and forth on an interview aboutContinue reading “Noise, by Darin Bradley”
Samuel Snoek-Brown 